


The Secret of Flight

by aegistheia



Category: Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: Gen, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-24
Updated: 2010-09-24
Packaged: 2017-11-17 06:17:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/548511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aegistheia/pseuds/aegistheia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ability to fly isn't inborn, no matter if you came to be with wings.</p><blockquote>
  <p>"Wings. You need to open them first," Cerberus says with incredible patience.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	The Secret of Flight

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** The Secret of Flight  
>  **Rating:** G  
>  **Genre:** General  
>  **Word Count:** 3108  
>  **Warnings:** None. If Clow Reed's need for involving magical theory in every appearance he makes doesn't count as a warning.  
>  **Also Archived On:** [Livejournal](http://aegiscrypt.livejournal.com/2055.html); [Dreamwidth](http://aegiscrypt.dreamwidth.org/2178.html).  
>  **Summary:** The ability to fly isn't inborn, no matter if you came to be with wings.  
>  **A.N.:** Happy belated Mid-Autumn Festival! I would have posted it then if Yue hadn't fought me every single step of the way. Also, I realize that neither Cerberus nor Yue fly like birds in either the anime or manga. But I figure magic can't exactly fuel their every flight, so this was born.

_takeoff_

 

"Wings. You need to open them first," Cerberus says with incredible patience.

"If I do, the wind will lift me right off my feet."

"That's kind of the point. Besides, Windy loves you; she won't let you hit the ground."

"Considering how you very nearly crashed on your first attempt, I think I have every reason to be a little more cautious. Besides, Windy loves everyone, Cerberus."

"Will you just unfurl your wings? You don't have to take off right away, just feel around with them." Cerberus sounds a lot more grouchy now, though, so Yue obliges him with a sigh.

With his wings out and spread, he can't help but pay attention to the slightest flicker at the edges of his peripheral senses as they tremble in the cold.

"They're very sensitive," he remarks with some surprise. He'd known that they were filled with nerve endings, but to this extent... "Almost more so than my hands."

"Are they?" Cerberus says, sounding equally curious. "My paws are definitely more sensitive than my wings, that's for sure, but..." He opens his wings, then mantles them. "You have a point, there, actually. They're pretty close."

The air sweeps below his primaries, intimate and enticing, and Yue shivers despite himself. The roof tiles are cool beneath his feet, and suddenly rather unwelcome to his soles. Of their own volition, his wings flex and widen.

Cerberus is quiet, golden eyes unreadable on him.

Yue casts his gaze away towards the faint horizon instead, and leaps.

He plummets for a few heart-stopping beats before the wind rips away all attempt at distant theorizing. His wings billow out in a snap of white instinct, and then all he can do is react and, oh—

The ground drops away as the sky expands over him, and the air is alive about him, fluid and chaotic and pressing secrets into every stretch of feather and skin, every little whorl and flow keen on his nerves. He leans to the side and the pine tree angles from his trajectory, and he's coasting now, riding on the hurrying currents lower and lower towards the beginning of the tree line. Acutely aware of the slipstream rolling from beneath him, he takes one wing stroke, marvelling at the flavour of the air as it dances about him, caressing him and pulling at him, dragging as he banks and slows the world to a more manageable blur.

There's something alight in his chest as it is borne from the earth, fierce and electric. He seizes the air and swings back towards the mansion, into a familiar wind that lifts and beckons.

"Higher!" Cerberus's bellow is barely audible, and Yue complies without thinking, arching his back and cupping wingfuls of air to force it down in progressively rockier beats. Resistance fades as he gains speed, and he's buoyed up faster and faster as he streaks through the layers of churning wind.

He's never felt so alive.

The air is almost unbearably warm now, buffeting and intensifying as he climbs the altitudes. He very nearly gets cut out by an unexpected gale from behind, but a wobble and a sharp pivot saves him from losing more than several feet of height before he's straining upwards again.

There's a moment when he honestly thinks he may be thrown out of the sky when the crosswinds meet in a near-tempestuous crash of temperature and mad energy. He's still not high enough, though, _he's_ _not high enough_ , and so he struggles against it, balance tipping precariously from one wing-tip to the other in less than a second as he's heaved by the raging heavens, and—

And suddenly he's free, and the winds are laminar and icy, and he can see the curve of the world as it stretches beyond comprehension.

He rises as high as he can, until even his magical lungs are fighting to keep up the simulacrum of breathing. Then he leans into a broad, shallow turn, careful of his rise and fall as the wicked jet streams split and merge and split again, and tilts his head back.

The moon is ringed in a halo of ice and frost, a fractured silver glow in the frigid sky. Were he not so aware of the vortices spiralling into life at the tips of his primaries he would close his eyes and bask. As it is, he merely sweeps into another slow turn beneath the serene swell, hair streaming back from his face and body thrumming in time with the lunar pulse.

"See? That wasn't so hard." Cerberus loops about him in a lazy wheel of ruffled fur and wings, and Yue notes the currents almost unconsciously as they shift with Cerberus's every pass. "It certainly feels a lot less complicated than what those books stuffed in the back corner of Clow's library said!"

"This is your first successful glide," he reminds him, and Cerberus has the gall to look _surprised_.

"You're right! It is! Yes, I did it!" He whirls into an ecstatic flip and Yue shakes his head. So much for volunteering to teach him how to fly.

When he looks down, Clow Reed is looking up and smiling at them.

He doesn't recall much of the descent, wind-whipped and quick, but he does remember the end of it as if the night air had frozen it in crystal in his mind: Clow Reed reaches up to him, hands out and welcome, and guides him down onto the ground.

"We flew today," he reports, rather stupidly.

"You were glorious to watch," Clow replies, and teases a lock of hair from its tangle about his temple.

Yue takes a breath to keep at bay the urge to reach for Clow's hand as it lingers, and then another.

Clow is looking up at the sky again. "There's a storm coming," he says absently.

"The night is beautiful," Yue breathes, only half a question.

Clow turns to look at him as his hand falls away, and beneath the moon's glow his smile is transcendent. More than the sky, more than the rush of air beneath his wings, he's— "The herald before clashing fronts are always the most peaceful."

"Then we may as well spend the night outside until the storm arrives," Cerberus says from behind him, and Yue starts in time for Cerberus to nudge him in the small of his knee and force him forward.

Clow bears his weight with gentle hands and gentler patience as Yue fights for balance. Cerberus doesn't help by weaving around his legs, and then about Clow's legs too.  Before Yue can berate him, Cerberus looks up as well and points his paw up at an arc of about two hundred stars, leaning harder into Yue's right side. "Tell me about that star," he demands.

Chuckling quietly, Clow eases them both down onto the grass, spreading his robe upon which he draws Yue down. He lays a hand on Cerberus's scruff as Cerberus curls into Clow's other side, and squints up into the sky, the little smile never leaving his lips. "That looks like...Altair, I believe. Or is it Vega?  Well, we can begin with the tale of the Cowherd and the Weaving Maiden and their bridge of magpies. That's always a safe place to start."

They spend the night stargazing, connecting glimmer after glimmer in a web of legends and cultural quirks. Yue allows himself to lean a fraction into Clow's warmth as he begins to narrate Chang'E legacy, and smiles into the dark.

 

 

 

_sustain_

 

So he isn't the most graceful being to have been created, fine.

"No, you're not," Yue agrees.

Kero shoots him a nasty look. "Hey, I learned how to fly earlier than you did!"

"You have atrocious form," Yue tells him exactingly, and Kero rolls his eyes. That hypocrite!

"I'm older than you; what happened to respect for elders?"

"We were created at the same time, Cerberus."

"I opened my eyes earlier!"

"By a second at most."

"So I'm a second older than you, you big baby.  _And_ I transformed first."

He wishes he'd swallowed those words the moment he finishes the sentence, because then Yue goes quiet, the kind of quiet that Kero dislikes most seeing on him.

So he transforms, and scuttles up to Yue's leg before the clouds of dust quite clears. "So help me fly already," he squeaks up at Yue.

Yue picks him up with more delicacy than he'd expected, which says a lot. "You're tiny," he says, quite unnecessarily.

"I still can't balance properly in this form," Kero grumbles. "Walking alone took two days. Two! I feel like I'm going to get blown over by a gust of wind stronger than a sea breeze."

"I suspect magic has some influence in this," Yue says.

"I'm not expending magic just to _fly_ ," Kero says, vaguely insulted, and beats Yue's palm for good measure. "What's the point of using the power we got to help our master to keep ourselves up?"

"We are beings of magic," Yue points out, dry as sand.  "Not expending magic to continue our existence is a moot argument."

"Quit quibbling word logistics with me; you know I know that," Kero snaps. Of all the times to go dictionary on him... "Point is, if I can fly without eating into my power reserves, then I am sure as hell doing it."

"It certainly won't hurt if you use more accurate terms to describe your situation," Yue says, but starts talking again before Kero gets his mouth properly open in time to retort. "Have you figured out the problem yet?"

"I have lots of them," Kero informs him vindictively, "so I hope you spared alllll day for me."

"Let us deal with the primary one today."

Kero exhales, and frowns as he gets up slowly. "See, we just glide a lot, right. But in this form," Kero jumps and demonstrates, and then just barely recovers in time to keep from smacking into the ground, "soaring and— aw crap— and gliding isn't a possibility. I think I have to flap like a pigeon to get anywhere." And damn if it's not tiring!

"Like a pigeon?" Yue says, perplexed.

"A lot of up-and-down beats. It's really annoying." He makes two harder ones experimentally, and nearly yaws into a particularly stubborn backwind— may all its distributaries _die of thirst and neglect_ —

The bright side – and thank Clow, at least there's a bright side – is that he gets tossed into a really lovely headwind, and he actually manages to reach the top of the cypress on that little gust alone before he has to drift back down again.

"I'm back," he announces without preamble when Yue's shiny head of hair comes into focus.

"I wonder how it feels like to fly without being able to use magic," Yue muses, and just. Damn it, Yue.

Kero gestures for Yue's palm and taxis to an inelegant stop when he holds it out steady. "Quit thinking about the alternate forms," he says, and glares when Yue makes to look away. " _Keep your eyes on me_. You don't know Clow Reed's mind any more than I do. There isn't any benefit to twisting your hair into knots around it."

"I love him," Yue says plainly.

"As do I," Kero says, and manfully resists the urge to slap a tiny paw in the centre of Yue's forehead. On the off-chance that Yue might take revenge by flicking him out of the air, he probably won't be able to recover without retransforming, and that isn't the point of the exercise.

Instead, he launches into the air and makes a brave attempt at hovering in front of Yue's face. Those wee songbirds, they've got his absolute respect now. "So what if you've got a wingless alternate?"

"I won't ever use it," Yue says definitively.

"You haven't even tried it out. How would you know—"

" _I won't ever use it_ ," Yue says, again, and— okay.  Okay.

"Good for you," Kero says, "now let's focus on _my_ problem here, which is currently a lot worse than your unknown wingless one. How the hell does Clow Reed expect me to keep up with you if I can't even fly? It's not like I can _trot_ after you!"

"If you open your wings, the wind from our steps might lift you up," Yue tells him seriously, and Kero really does thump him in the forehead this time.

He's proud to report to Clow, later, that he manages to fully dodge Yue's returning swipe.

(He doesn't manage to stop Yue from adding that he'd also hit the ground dodging. But Yue's got the funny dot on his forehead all day before he realizes its existence and tries to exact revenge in the form of some Very Sharp Ice, and by then Kero's back in full form and soaring, so it's all good.)

(Until the next practice.)

 

 

 

_land_

 

It's an unspoken common opinion amongst the wingless that they were not meant to fly because they were not born with the wings to do so. It's just circumstance in one of their ancestors, they say, that made fate for them.

In reality, they're just very lazy and bad at making excuses, the latter of which is more unforgivable because they were born with the minds to actually, properly make them.

...there also may, Clow reflects with a little humour, be validity behind the frequency at which people call him callous. It is quite hard to countenance fools without poking fun at them. And, well, perhaps it's not fair of him to call them lazy. Half of what he does is because he's lazy himself, and laziness can be just as potent an inspiration as need.

But laziness is only a feeble excuse at best. Later on their descendents will gain more mental breadth to think beyond their limits, so he supposes he should forgive them for now. Besides, he has his own laziness to overcome and even less of a foundation upon to base an excuse, since all he's doing right now is ruminating in the garden.

So he closes his fingers around the first faint sigh of wind.

Yue and Cerberus both bear the prototype, mostly because he hasn't the faintest idea how to wrap raw orbital magic around anything less than pure, independent sentience.  But if he can just focus the magic enough for it to take form more around the sky-yearning than around his will, to lock into itself and perpetuate and _want_ —

He opens his hands, and the Fly curls into being around him, a graceful creature of instinct and little more.

"Hello," he says with a smile. "It's a pleasure to meet you. I suppose you already know who I am, but it's never wrong to introduce oneself, so: my name is Clow Reed, and I am your creator."

The Fly unfolds its wings, and Clow admires the sheen of the moon through its near-translucent pinions. He reaches up and strokes down its long neck, and it bends to croon by his ear, claws gentle on his forearm.

"You should stretch those out," he says, nodding at the wings cupped about him, and it erupts into the air in an explosion of grace so sleek he aches at the sight.  It pinwheels across the sky, silhouetting the vague clouds, and gives a great cry of triumphant joy that must reverberate for miles.

When it comes back down in a falcon's dive, he's ready for the impact of its landing. Thus, he's pleasantly surprised when the Fly lands with a touch almost softer than the Firey's hair.

"Aren't you full of surprises," he laughs. It preens his hair in response and Clow laughs again. "Why don't you perch on that branch so I can show you the Sealing Wand and how it works."

Once seated on the branch just above his shoulder, though, it pays virtually no attention to the wand, beady eyes fixed onto him the entire time and head barely swivelling even when he takes out his own wand for comparison. When he pauses, it chirrups quietly and bends low to nudge at his back, one claw scratching lightly.

Clow takes a step forward and turns to regard it quizzically. "What's gotten you so distracted?"

It reaches for him again, rather strongly reminiscent of sunflowers to their namesakes, and Clow finds himself smiling despite himself.

"Oh, very well, then," he relents, and allows the Fly to sink into him, sink _into_ him, and bear him aloft into the endless sky.

It is...different, with wings. He has never required them to fly himself; there are myriads of spells and incantations from both sides of his family for wingless flight, and in a perfect storm he can always just blast his power around for some short-term jet propulsion. The surrounding hundred mile or so of magicians would no doubt faint from the pressure or try to murder him for trying to knock them out, sure, but such situations usually call for more creative measures. Of course they wouldn't be able to kill him, but no doubt it will be somewhat entertaining.

With wings, though, the very nature of air becomes a cradle and a noose, a source of power and an ocean of vulnerability. If he was but a miniscule handful of his strength, he could conceivably fly without tracking himself like a comet across the sky for any being with the weakest magical senses.

And, of course, there would not be any homicidal magicians after his blood. That's a bonus.

"Let's land now," he says aloud, and angles the wings towards the ground. It rushes up in a surprisingly dizzying blur of green and brown, and he feels the Fly bank until they stall into a gentle little dip of a lift, and he's set on his feet like he's just been born into the world again.

"Thank you," he say, placing his hand on its breast as it settles on his outstretched arm again. "I can see why this desire is so powerful, now." Perhaps he should be less hard on the other wingless. This kind of raw longing really is rather hard to think through.

But he has his history to write, and time is pressing down upon him, upon them all. So he draws the Fly close.

"You will love her best," he tells the Card, "and so you will bear my deepest seal, so that you may find her first."

The Fly winds about him, cooing, and Clow kisses it lightly.

"Forgive me," he whispers, and sinks the first threads of fate upon its wings.

 

 

 

 _-fin_ \- 


End file.
